Intelligence and Intelli-ladies

In an interview yesterday, Kapil Dev remarked that while Indian cricketers had loads of talent, they seemed to lack “cricket intelligence” or CI, as he called it. He said that the fact that Sachin had not won as many matches for India as he should have with his talent, made him believe that he was not in the same CI league as, say, Javed Miandad was.

Kapil makes an interesting point. I have often heard it said that Indians lacked killer instinct, but it is for the first time that I hear the word ‘intelligence’ applied in this context.

Howard Gardner was the first to theorise, in his treatise “Frames of Mind” that human intelligence was not a single entity that could be assessed by simplistic psychometric tests, but had multiple dimensions such as Visual / Spatial Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence, Logical/Mathematical Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, Intrapersonal Intelligence, and Bodily / Kinesthetic Intelligence. Later he added ‘naturalist intelligence’ and ‘spiritual intelligence’ to the list. All these intelligences are important, but each person has a unique blend of these intelligences. Gardner argues that the big challenge facing the deployment of human resources is how to best take advantage of the uniqueness conferred on us as a species exhibiting several intelligences.

Thus, you could have a brilliant mathematician like Ramanujam endowed with much logical/numerical intelligence but who could be completely lacking in musical intelligence. Or, an author like R.K.Narayan high in linguistic intelligence, but poor in inter-personal skills. Some with high spatial intelligence may solve the Rubik cube in a minute, but may flunk the maths test in school the next day. While I, an otherwise intelligent person, can’t crack the Rubik’s cube even if you taught me the steps. Learning/teaching should therefore focus on the particular strength of each person and appropriate teaching modalities applied. If you want me to learn to solve Rubik's puzzle, sing out the solution melodiously.

So, intelligence can be specific to one domain and in a limited arena. Just because a top batsman has bodily/kinesthetic intelligence to execute an exquisitive cover drive or an awesome square-cut, he may not necessarily possess Cricket intelligence or CI, which is something more or that extra bit that is required to win a match.

Maybe, there is something called Bloggers Intelligence (BI) as well. Notice how some bloggers make clever use of the medium, with the right mix of humour, sensationalism and conversational style of writing, while some like me don’t manage to figure it out at all.